Frases de Wallace Stevens

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The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully
The palm at the end of the mind: selected poems and a play‎ - Página 281, de Wallace Stevens - Publicado por Knopf, 1971 - 404 páginas

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contexto: p>So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.</p

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Contexto: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Contexto: The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary... What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Variante: Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
Contexto: The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.</p

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Contexto: What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.

"Hieroglyphica" (1934)

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Contexto: p>Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.</p

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Contexto: Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contexto: p>The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.</p

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Contexto: What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contexto: p>He is and may be but oh! He is, he is,
This foundling of the infected past, so bright,
So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him
No names. Dismiss him from your images.
The hot of him is purest in the heart. </p

"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Contexto: Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Contexto: I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

"Poetry is a Destructive Force"
Parts of a World (1942)
Contexto: That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Contexto: The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contexto: p>As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.</p

"The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet"
The Necessary Angel (1951)
Contexto: It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Contexto: p>The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.</p

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Contexto: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contexto: p>In being more than an exception, part,Though an heroic part, of the commonal.
The major abstraction is the commonal,
The inanimate, difficult visage.</p

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Contexto: It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contexto: p>Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.</p

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Contexto: The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.

"Men Made Out of Words"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Contexto: Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)
Contexto: Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.

"Men Made Out of Words"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Contexto: Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Contexto: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.